One of the many challenges arts organisations face is how to help their staff understand their business model and the ways in which variations in income, audience levels and spend in the cafe can affect the financial health of the organisation.

This challenge can appear at any level of an organisation, from the creative director who attends board meetings but doesn't really understand the financials beyond the impact on the programming budget to the front line staff on reception desks or invigilating exhibitions who are in a great position to up-sell to audiences if only they realised what a difference this could make to the organisation as a whole.

This isn't about an absence of data – the data exists. Nor is it about a lack of willingness – organisations know there is need for a cultural shift. The big question is how to make this shift without it seeming like the whole focus of the organisation has shifted from the artistic to the fiscal.

The good news? This is not the first time a sector has faced this challenge and there are lessons we can learn from elsewhere. If we look at the way that the healthcare sector has had to adjust from large three-to-10-year geographic contracts to a funding system based on personalisation of services and individual user-held contracts, we find organisations such as the Brandon Trust.

This Bristol charity has reimagined the way it communicates progress via its annual report so the information makes sense not just to staff but also to its customer base of adults with learning disabilities and their families. The latest annual report 'Mark's adventures in a Big Society' was an animation film with a fictional service user taking readers and viewers on a journey through the financial year.

The Brandon Trust are not the only people grappling with these challenges. David McCandless has been creating beautiful and useful landscapes and maps of data for several years on the basis that if we can visualise financial information we will interact with it more readily than if we are simply bombarded with figures.

So how can the culture sector apply its creative and artistic skills to help staff better understand their organisation's business model and identify ways in which they can actively contribute to improving its sustainability?

I'd suggest that this is about experiencing the information. When I work with creatives to help them fully understand the role of money in realising their creative and business potential, we lay the axes of a graph on the floor and move between different positions on the graph to map our ability to realise creative ideas when we have financial wealth as opposed to when we are financially poor.

It's a powerful exercise – each participant experiences a very personal mix of emotions from a sense of potential to the fear of selling out. Next time they have to make decisions about how they use their resources and what level of risk they are willing to take, they'll remember what they felt and why, as well as how they can use their new knowledge. The physical memory is a powerful addition to the cognitive memory.

So if an emotional and physical experience augments an intellectual and visual one, what new ways of engaging with data would be helpful? David McCandless has adapted the phrase 'data is the new oil' phrase to become 'data is the new soil', reflecting his view that data offers a set of creative opportunities.

As arts professionals we have a great variety of creative talent accessible to us – how could we make use of this? Is it about dance organisations asking a choreographer to interpret financial data into a dance piece? Could those working in craft learn from knitting a pie chart of their income sources? I'm thinking patchwork quilt analogies here.

You may have better ideas – do share them below – but the principle is a straightforward one and comes back to that Chinese proverb: "Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I'll understand."

Sarah Thelwall is founder of MyCake, an online toolkit for creative businesses, and the Culture Benchmark – follow her on Twitter @MyCakeFinance

MyCake will be delivering free half day workshops on the Culture Benchmark for non-profit arts and culture organisations across England – for registration details, visit MyCake on eventbrite